2002
You know that “low-budget” Hollywood film called The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers? Well, it’s under-fire on a Two Towers protest site for being insensitive toward the tragic event of September 11th. That’s right, Two Towers must be an allusion to the World Trade Center towers. This claim is simply ludacrious. The people running this web site should be flamed so badly that they get 500 e-mails a day until their ISPs shut down their accounts.
Okay, yes, September 11th was tragic. I think most people agree with that, but to claim that a book written long before Osama and his minions learned how to fly is somehow related to the event is garbage.
There is a quote on the web site that just cracks me up. Here goes:
“We believe that Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema’s actions are in fact hate speech. The movie is intentionally being named The Two Towers in order to capitalize on the tragedy of September 11. Clearly, you cannot deny the fact that this falls under hate speech. We believe that if they will not willingly change the name, the government should step in to stop the movie’s production or to force a name change.”
You people can’t be serious. Please tell me you’re not serious. This web site has to be shut down for the sake of humanity.
Well I woke up around 8:00 this morning and we opened presents to the sounds of the Rat Pack singing Christmas tunes. We then had cinnamon rolls (thanks Gates family) along with scrambled eggs. My mom had made toffee the night before and I swear it tastes better a day aged.
My Christmas bounty list
- Three shirts and a pair of pants from Banana Republic.
- A Kenneth Cole: Reaction black jacket.
- Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones (Widescreen) DVD.
- Michael Crichton. Prey.
- A nice little check from my grandparents.
- Best Buy gift card (just in time for tomorrow’s sale).
- Más clothes, including a Gap button-up shirt and a cotton long-sleeve shirt.
- Lots of other great stuff that is too numerous to mention.
By the way, I think the funniest thing of the morning was watching my dog, Blizzard, chase her new toy, a mallard duck squeaky toy that has fake fur on its back. The duck even sounds like a real duck when it squeaks.
Thanks to everyone and merry Christmas!
In case you didn’t know, Trent Lott, the former is in a world of pain. It really hurts when Aaron McGruder disses you, since he does it so well. I opened up the Chronicle this morning and he ran a great Trent Lott commentary in his latest Boondocks strip.
Also, Wired News ran a fun feature story today on how Trent Lott’s latest slip-up is currently the most popular weblog discussion topic. I found that the most interesting quandry is that since he doesn’t know what a weblog is, do you think he is offended by the discussion? My guess is probably not until he realizes that “bloggers” are other Americans dissing him. Instapundit.com got mentioned in the article, and their coverage of the Lott crisis is okay but not the best I’ve seen. If you have a better feature weblog, please post a link. My current favorite Lott basher is Andrew Sullivan, but he’s on vacation at the moment.
Honestly, poor old Trent deserves to be dissed. First off, he likes Strom Thurmond. Secondly, he shoots his racist mouth off. Finally, he then pathetically tries to apologize on BET, which was just sad. See the McGruder strip for more info on that slip-up. I wonder what jokes Jay Leno is going to come up with about him. I haven’t been watching the Tonight Show lately.
The Boondocks cartoon strip featured in the article comes from uComics, which posts every daily funny.
I managed to get my hands on a taping of the Sigur Rós show from November 23 at the Warfield. It is awesome. The Sigur Rós news web site has some pictures to go along with the show. Their new single, “Vaka,” is the opening track, which is just plain brilliant. I hope their latest effort, (), at least gets recognized at the Grammy’s this year, since last year they got totally snubbed. I think they are one of the most innovative bands in the music scene right now.
The next time they come around on tour, either in L.A. or in San Francisco, I’m buying tickets. Hopefully by then they still won’t be on TRL. If you are interested in getting a copy of the show, try the Sigur Rós web site and I’m sure a fanatic will help you with a tape trade.
The Washington Post has an article entitled “Free Speech — Virtually” on its web site that warns webloggers to watch what they say on their journals. It is an article that focuses on what not to say about your job on your journal. The Post notes, “The most flippant of remarks published two years ago could broadcast something a company doesn’t want competitors or potential clients to know.” That’s not a big surprise, but a lot of bloggers I know post hastefully (I have done so myself) and the results can be very, very bad.
I think it’s safe advice to say that it’s not a good idea to talk about your job or your love life online at all. Data mining is a big business and there are always people out there looking to burn you. Don’t set yourself up.
Thanks to Slashdot for posting a link to the article in its feature, “Are Blogging and Unemployment Related?.”
Yesterday I went with Will and Aaron to see Gangs of New York, the latest film by Martin Scorcese. It was intense. The film is nearly three hours long and it is chock full of sex and violence. This is not a movie for your eight year old. However, in this film the violence was necessary.
Gangs of New York is about the Irish immigration during the Civil War period. The Irish were as despised as African Americans by much of the population. In the movie, this stringent nativisim is characterized by Bill the Butcher, the villain of the film. Leo DiCaprio plays Amsterdam Vallon, a young Irishman who seeks revenge on Bill the Butcher for the murder of his father, Priest Vallon. Priest Vallon is played by Liam Neeson, who is excellent in his short-lived role.
The movie takes place in the Five Points, an impoverished neighborhood in New York. It is a neighborhood packed with Irish, Poles, and American “natives.” A number of street gangs arise out of need for self-defense and protection. Amsterdam’s gang, the Dead Rabbits, is a thorn in the side of Bill the Butcher, who cries whenever he sees a “poor, helpless rabbit murdered.” The main conflict of the movie is the bad blood between Amsterdam and Bill the Butcher.
I thought Gangs of New York was an excellent film, one of the five best of the year. If you need something to do this holiday weekend, go see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Gangs of New York. You won’t be disappointed.
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I’ve switched the whole site over to Dreamhost and it will take a little while to get everything running smoothly since the domain name has to be switched over to the Dreamhost IP. This can take up to 72 hours so if the site isn’t working over the next few days, it’s probably the IP address switch. At least Movable Type is now running under MySQL and running without a hitch. Dreamhost is a heck of a lot faster than Hostway by the way. So far, service has been good. I’m liking the change.
I’m in the process of changing web hosts from Hostway to Dreamhost. Hostway has great service but it’s too expensive for my current budget. Dreamhost is half the price but offers more of the features I need, including subdomains and multiple FTP user accounts. Hopefully the whole transition goes smoothly.
What a crazy weekend. I came home from UCLA on Thursday to a terrible storm which hasn’t yet stopped. My fence blew down on Friday and my dad still isn’t sure whether or not shingles blew off the roof. The trees banged against the house all day on Saturday and last night we lost power at 12:30. I was walking downstairs to go to bed right when the power cut off. I was going to brush my teeth but I had to feel my way back upstairs to find a flashlight.
What a fun experience.
I’ve been reading Walter Mosley’s A Little Yellow Dog, and for half of today I had to read it by candlelight. Candlelight may be romantic during dinner but it sure is a pain when you’re trying to read. The power came back on today around 5:30 thankfully. It has finally stopped raining but it is supposed to pick back up tomorrow. Joy.
In an amazing finish, the UCLA Men’s Soccer team defeated Stanford 1-0 in the NCAA national championship. Aaron Lopez scored the winning goal off of an indirect kick placed by Ryan Futagaki. The goal was scored in the 88th minute, which was simply shocking. Stanford expected the game to go into overtime and was totally disoriented in the last two minutes of the game. The Bruins were so exicted that they started celebrating with three seconds still left on the clock. The crowd was made up of mostly UCLA fans with some Stanford fans interspersed, so the crowd noise in the last minute of the game was intense.
What a storybook ending.
This is the first championship that UCLA during my time as a Bruin. The Women’s Soccer team came very close to winning this year as well as Men’s Water Polo. Go Bruins!!
ESPN’s praise of UCLA Men’s Soccer:
Bruins ‘One’ Again
Stanford will have to wait until next season to try and end its recent skid against UCLA. Aaron Lopez scored off a free kick from Ryan Futagaki with 1:02 left in regulation as the Bruins clinched their fourth NCAA Division I men’s soccer championship with a 1-0 victory Sunday in Dallas. The Cardinal lost twice to their Pac-10 rivals during the regular season — and both were nail-biting 1-0 decisions.
I must say, the Chronicle covered the story nicely in its feature. It is a very Stanford-biased paper, since most of its readers lean toward Berkeley or Stanford, but it definitely tipped its hat for the Bruins.
By the way, a thank you goes out to ESPN for the nice photos. I hope you guys don’t mind too much.
I surfed over to ESPN.com’s College Sports section and noticed that UCLA Men’s Soccer is the top story of the moment. Their blurb is in the full text of the article. ESPN also has a nice write-up of the game.
The week of finals a young woman in Fir, part of the DeNeve residence hall complex on campus was sexually assaulted by three high school students on a campus tour. They were visiting the dorms when apparently they snuck into her room and then proceeded to rape her. I don’t know how they managed to accomplish this nor to whom it happened. All I know is that this kind of activity must be stopped at UCLA because it is just creepy. Chancellor Carnesale even posted a disclaimer on the front page of the UCLA site. The link to the sexual violence page at the Center for Women and Men is pretty informative.
Since I’m a guy I usually don’t have to think about this kinds of things, but I know recently that many of the girls in the dorms were very freaked out by this event. Hopefully when I get back from vacation nothing like this will happen again. I hate that this kind of activity goes on in the first place, since it forces girls to be on guard around guys all the time, and UCLA is around fifty percent male.
KCAL has an article about the story on its web site.
I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails about AIM+ from Big-O-Software, an AIM plug-in that removes the advertisements from AOL Instant Messenger. Big-O-Software’s site has been down recently due to an unexpected surge in traffic related to their latest release of the plug-in. I checked their site this morning and it works fine. However, they have delayed the release of AIM+ 3.0 for those of you that really wanted it. Their forums are locked out because they know people are going to complain about the delay.
If you can’t get AIM+ at all or you are fed up with their current version, I recommend checking out MyIM, a copycat plug-in of AIM+. Some of my friends at school are using it and it works fine. Try it and see if you like it.
I was reading through Sports Illustrated and there was a photo of Pete Sampras inside talking about his new baby. That reminded me of him playing down at the LATC (Los Angeles Tennis Center) which is right across from my dorm room. If you come walking back from class in the afternoon definitely walk by the LATC (to the left of BruinWalk from campus) and you might just see Pete practicing with the UCLA Tennis team. He doesn’t always practice there but you might just be lucky enough to catch him one day.
According to today’s New York Times article, Cardinal Law has resigned from his position as archbishop in the Boston archdiocese. Cardinal Law knowingly kept some sexually abusive priests on his staff, which is simply unacceptable. As a Catholic, I detest this sort of corruption in the church and am glad that he is finally taking some sort of responsibility, albeit a little too late to do any real good.
The media slander of Catholic priests this last year has been atrocious. By the way the story was reported you’d think at least half of all priests are sexual perverts, right? That simply is not fair. The church has to deal with this problem but remember, the problem has been blown out of proportion because it is such a hot topic. My guess is that this sort of thing goes on in every religion but the Catholic church was hard hit primarily because of its openness with children, which is why some of these pedophiles joined the clergy in the first place.
Wired.com is running a funny article on “Treetop Bloggers” up in the Headwaters of Northern California this morning. It made me think back to the time when Woody Harrelson climbed up the Golden Gate Bridge and stopped traffic for hours with a similar tree protest. My dad was sitting in traffic during that one. Now, a woman is protesting deforestation by blogging in a tree! Can you get any more bizarre? I don’t think so.
I’ve noticed that Peer-to-Peer File Sharing continues to be an essential of UCLA college life. It’s essential because kids here are big time culture freaks. File sharing is just something that happens. The official school policy is that file sharing is cool on campus just reduce the amount of serving. The serving is what scares the school. There are legal issues to serving. Why? Legally it shows that you made a conscious effort to piracy if you are serving movies and music. What’s the big deal? Well, UCLA doesn’t want a law suit. I can understand that.
However, their bigger issue is bandwidth. Sharing sucks up the bandwidth like crazy because the UCLA network lines are set asymetrically so that uploads will consume more bandwidth than downloads. This improves campus download speeds but only if people aren’t uploading a lot of files. This ideal model breaks down when you have to deal with clever students.
The current trend is the use of KaZaA Lite, a free program that is anti-KaZaA because KaZaA includes spyware in the installer. It can be found on a number of mirror sites, including kazaalite.com, the most popular one. Watch out for pop-up spamming on the web site link though. That is their site not mine. Pretty much all of the KaZaA Lite site mirrors do that. If you have a better one, just post a comment.
Why is this bad? Well, spyware applications tend to send data to server(s) on the Internet without your knowledge. In short, you don’t know what they’re doing with your computer data so you should be scared.
The funny thing about the shift to KaZaA Lite from KaZaA is that people are fed up with bad software. KaZaA is simply terrible. The program is bulky, full of evil things like pop-up programs, etc. KaZaA Lite is bad but at least it’s free from a corporate identity. This is the trend of P2P. People have gotten hooked on it and there will always be somebody out there writing a new program.
This is something that cannot be controlled and should not be controlled. It is a new wave form of free speech. The problem is not P2P but how people use P2P. Just ask Phil Agre, who is a master on this subject. He posted a nice link to a cool P2P convention at UC Berkeley in his latest dispatch of Red Rock Eater.
Well the UCLA athletics department finally made a smart move. They got rid of the football head coach, Bob Toledo after he handed the USC/UCLA game over to USC for the fourth straight year. Any coach that loses to a big time rival in four straight years is going to go packing. He knew it after the game.
ESPN ran a new feature on him yesterday and in the article there is a report that the Bruin athletics department is talking to Mike Riley, one of the former trainers at USC. He’s a solid coach and he’s going to give Pete Carroll a run for his money over the next few seasons if we hire him. Why? He’s more likely to run a USC style game which just dominated over us this year because Toledo was much too predictable and conservative in his play calls.
What an interesting fiasco.
I was prepping for my Spanish 25 (Advanced Spanish Composition) final for tomorrow and I re-read an article on the bilingual language system in America. America supports a very large Hispanic population especially in the Southern part of the country. I have to write on whether or not the introduction of a bilingual language system in America is beneficial. Here goes:
Statistically, Hispanic immigration to the United States is sourced most highly from Mexico and Cuba. Immigrants from these countries come here for economic prosperity that they can’t get at home. The vast majority does not speak English proficiently enough to read signs or navigate properly. Keeping America only in English makes it known that English is the “official” language of the States, but doesn’t the Constitution declare that there is no official language? How “official” is the English language? Well, it’s very important when it comes to economics. The whole world revolves around money and English is the language of business. This is a debate without a simple solution. All that I can say is that if Anglo Americans don’t make Hispanic immigrants welcome, it’s just perfect example of reverse racism. I think a realistic proposal is the introduction of bilingual signs only in the part of the country that has a large Hispanic immigrant population and then add more signs as the population shifts. This saves taxpayers money and it benefits the immigrants who are helping to run the American economic system. A win-win situation, right? Well, it can get better. Many of these immigrants become citizens but they still can’t speak English. What’s the most important right of a citizen? The ability to vote. Making easy to read ballots in English and Spanish benefits the country because Hispanics strive to achieve economic success.
As a side note, I looked up Elián Gonzalez on Google and found that he still has an official propaganda page! How funny is that? I also enjoyed the cartoon feature Daryl Cagle ran on Elian on Slate.
Are you a Winamp user but you don’t really keep up with the news about Nullsoft? Have you considered upgrading to Winamp3 or already have done so?
Today I was bored and tired of studying so I opened up Winamp to play a song. I use Winamp 2.81 because I don’t like the current Winamp3 too much. I find that it is plagued by the quick introduction of too many features. There is so much stuff in the new release that it disorients people. The “Thinger” is cool but for the average user, they won’t know what’s going on! That got me thinking, I wonder if anybody has written a good review of the latest release of Winamp3 except on the Winamp forums. I mean, obviously they have a thorough review of the player there, but not everybody reads their forums regularly. A lot of the people on the Winamp forums love anything Nullsoft puts out, so the positive comments outweigh the negative ones.
Granted, even fewer people read my site but I figured I’ve give it a shot since Google tends to outrank weblogs over forums. I ran a Google search for “winamp3 review” and “winamp 3 review” but only a few articles came up and none of them directly link to the posts that Nullsoft reads!
I’m a huge fan of Winamp and I really want them to push a good product so that they can keep up with Microsoft. Windows Media Player is great at playing video but right now it just can’t touch Winamp in terms of speed, ease of use, and robustness.
I’m not saying Winamp3 is totally sucky. It’s just that the current version that they released as a stable release is really flawed. The ideas of Winamp3 are great. The Wasabi skinning interface is cool because it allows people to turn Winamp into exactly the player they want. The new version also includes a media library and a built-in crossfader. It even has a built in Lyrics3 extended tag editor.
Lyrics3 is a tag format that allows for longer file names inside an MP3 tag but they don’t compromise system speed like ID3v2. Lyrics3 is really cool because when you retag a file it doesn’t save the information at the beginning of the file but at the end. ID3v2 stores them at the beginning of the file and this should be a big no no. When people edit these tags, the entire file gets rewritten, which is a big risk to your hard drive. If you retag a lot of files you will kill your drive faster than if you use Lyrics3.
The media library is messy in the current downloadable version but Nullsoft will fix that.
Nullsoft’s problem is that AOL owns them. AOL is converting Winamp into an AOL product and therefore will accidentially make it sucky. Just look at the latest version of AIM. Could you be any more plagued by featuritis? I don’t think so. AOL Expressions: don’t make me laugh. If you want a good chat client use the older version of AIM or be daring and get Trillian.
Winamp3 spams your computer with AOL shortcuts when you install it. It could also install annoying AOL features such as a “custom Internet toolbar!” but they haven’t resorted to that yet. What I find funny is that the new version has a video player. What they need to realize is that Microsoft and Quicktime have pretty much cornered the video market already. Winamp owns the MP3 scene but only if it keeps its player small and usable. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player is a bulky behemoth that loads way slower. I did my own little test of Winamp3 and depending on the skin you use, Winamp3 can either be pretty fast or really, annoyingly slow. I think people will inadvertantly install bulky skins and then wonder why their player has crapped out on them.
Honestly, most people use Winamp just for listening to MP3s and they do so because it loads faster than Microsoft’s. I love Winamp 2.81 because it just works and it has everything I need. You can tweak the DirectSound input in the player to have it fade in on tracks how you want or you can even get the SqrSoft crossfader which is just a great plug-in.
Winamp3 will eventually be a sleek, killer application but as of now it is not. I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever download Winamp3, just not right now. I have no idea how long Nullsoft will take to really fix Winamp3 so that it is actually better than Winamp 2.81, but at their current rate of progress there are a lot of bugs to deal with. I look forward to seeing the finished project and I will totally switch to it then.
I think some people like the flashiness of skinning but if it sacrifices performance then they will eventually ditch it. People aren’t stupid. Usability is the key issue and Winamp 2 was very usuable. That’s why I continue to use it. The audiophiles choose Winamp because it is the fastest player with the best features out there and I think it Winamp3 is evolving into something better than Winamp2. However, Nullsoft really should warn people more before they put out a player that is this buggy.
They’re already gotten a pretty good backlash on the release and I’m not going to flame them for it. I just wanted to warn common Winamp users that if you download the initial release of Winamp3 you might experience a lot of problems.
Well it’s time for United to file for bankrupcy. I got a cryptic e-mail from them today regarding my Frequent Flyer miles and what they plan on doing in the future. Naturally it is optimistic since companies can rebound from Chapter 11 bankrupcy, but still, it makes me wonder if things are going to dramatically change. Take a look at the e-mail for yourself and see what you think.
E-mail from United
It is no secret that things have been tough at United. We were disappointed to learn yesterday that the Airline Transportation Stabilization Board (ATSB) could not approve the proposal submitted by United for a $1.8 billion federal loan guarantee.
Whatever course we now chart with the company, I want to be emphatically clear that United will continue to fly and deliver exceptional service to customers worldwide. And, as a Mileage Plus(R) member, you can continue to accrue and redeem miles with confidence.
Challenging times make a company stronger, leaner and more focused. The employees of this airline stand ready and committed to serve you today and in the future.
Thank you for your support and we’ll keep you posted.
Sincerely,
Chris Bowers
Senior Vice President
Marketing and sales
